A “Privacy Policy” commonly refers to what is technically a business’ “Privacy Statement” or “Privacy Notice”. The policy is made up of the internal and external protocols, rules, guidelines and steps that a business takes regarding the collection, use, storage and destruction of personally identifying information (PII) and non-personal (aka. “technical”) information. Businesses put a […]
If your business relies on insights from reviews, comments or other aggregated data, chances are that you are tempted to engage in a little (or a lot of) web scraping. Web scraping is essentially conducting automatic data extraction from one website, for use by a different party. It’s sometimes referred to as “web harvesting” or […]
2016 will be remembered as the year that privacy became the buzzword small businesses took notice of. We saw the establishment of the first ever Federal Privacy Council this year, read about numerous data breaches (and maybe even felt the impacts personally), and the US specifically felt the repercussions of the overturning of its data […]
A Time Old Tale: A Founder’s (Frenetic) Internal Thoughts 2 weeks to launch date. So many things to do. But first, another cup of coffee. Oh, but before that, let me ping the website designer for a quick status update on that misspelling on the landing page… 1 week to launch date. Should we push this […]
Before May 11, 2016, only three out of four forms of intellectual property – patents, trademarks and copyrights – were protectable and enforceable at the federal level. The Defend Trade Secrets Act of 2016 (DTSA) now provides federal protection for – you guessed it – trade secrets. Prior to the DTSA, trade secrets were enforced […]
Recently, we’ve been asked several times about the nature of a certain work as it relates to copyright infringement. “Is my work a derivative of theirs? I should be fine, right?” “Sure, I incorporate some of their copyrighted work, but mine is transformative enough, so I’m good, right?” As with most gray areas, […]
“Fashion Law”. It sounds like an oxymoron, doesn’t it? After all, fashion, which typically evokes images of supermodels and Anna Wintour, is more “The Devil Wears Prada” than “Devil’s Advocate”. Long considered too frou-frou for serious lawyers to be concerned with, fashion law has proven to be an emerging practice area in recent years, housed […]
Recently the FTC issued a warning letter to Cole Haan for a hashtag contest they were promoting on Pinterest, Contestants had to create a Pinterest board and post five pictures of Cole Haan shoes, pictures of places where they love to wander, and tag each photo with #WanderingSole, in order to win $1000 shopping money at Cole […]
Working interviews are a good way to see if the interview candidate has the basic necessary skills for a job, especially where a resume description of the skill may not suffice. Typically, the working interview is no more than a day or two, but in the case of a groomer, I think the interview would […]
At first glance, it may seem peculiar that the same trademark office would allow the registration of seemingly very similar trademarks; take “Apple Records” (the Beatles-founded record company) and “Apple Inc.” (the computer company), or the “San Francisco Giants” (they play baseball) and the “New York Giants” (a football team). Each owner of these separate […]